We know it’s hard to park in our neighborhood but even the parking po po are having trouble finding a space these days.
Reader Jason H. snapped this pic of a SFMTA officer parked on the sidewalk on Geary at Park Presidio yesterday around 6:30pm.
She’s on the phone, perhaps calling 311 to report a vehicle parked on the sidewalk?
I am hoping they are ticketing the stinky double Decker diesel spewing behemoth bus next to them.
@Maureen – looks like a regular bus to me – and ticketing them for what?
would love for there to be a few parking garages added along geary
Actually it’s a casino bus. Probably on its way out of town. Probably not parking illegally or using our Muni stop which creates maintenence issues as they are too heavy and breakdown the landing pads we all pay for.
ban all casino buses.
oh
SF Transit First. Good idea. How about some city support for that idea? Get cars off the street by providing (requiring!) adequate parking. If I could spend 1 minute instead of 20 circling for parking, I would a) not be burning fuel, b) not be contributing to global warming, and c) not in your way when you’re trying to drive at the speed limit without being stuck behind me while I circle for parking.
The Richmond is still pretty good, as far as things go. But I think you have more situations with five independent adults crammed into single family homes and apartments than before, and thus the change over recent years.
We could go to the model used in Japan. Everyone in San Francisco that wants to own a car has to show a “hokan basho shodaku shomei”.
Basically, you have to prove you have an off street parking space or you cannot get your car registered. It requires you to get a notarized document from the parking space landlord and then go to the police station and file paperwork. Then you get a sticker that lets you drive around town. No parking on any street without that sticker and at home it MUST be in the certificated parking spot. So garages never get filled up with junk!
Basically what they are saying is if you cannot afford and off street parking spot you cannot have a car.
@JD: I would say that it seems like bad policy to just allow as many cars as can possibly fit on the streets (as far as parking). I wish people cared more about the aesthetics of this, but class-based politics always win out.
It’s actually not so bad. You just kindof have to know where and when to park. I move my car every morning if I park it from the previous night, usually in a metered spot. Moving it from metered to non-metered isn’t so bad as there’s always plenty of spots by 9am.
On Clement and 25th it’s tough Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings between roughly 5 and 9pm, as people drive in to eat at the local spots. It’s bad, but nothing like trying to find parking in the lower Haight, for example, which is almost impossible any time of the day.
“I would say that it seems like bad policy to just allow as many cars as can possibly fit on the streets (as far as parking). I wish people cared more about the aesthetics of this, but class-based politics always win out.”
You do know that until the late 1940’s or early 1950’s that you could not park a car on the street in San Francisco over night without a permit. Every wonder why there are all those old parking garages from the 1930’s around town when there was a lot of open street parking. Most of those garages have been converted to other uses by the 1980’s.
@JD: Didn’t know that at all. Still, if something like this was proposed, can you imagine the chaos? ‘Discriminates against renters’ ‘Discriminates against low-income families’ etc etc etc. Could never happen in this climate. Wish it could because I find it very ugly to look at modern cars that look like something out of a comic book, everywhere I go!
It appears to me that the casino bus is unlawfully parked. That location is no stopping, turn or go straight lane and the bus is more than 18 inches away from the curb
@4thGen – So maybe that explains the officer – giving them a ticket. Thought they were maybe taking a right onto PP.
Condos now only have to provide a parking space for every four units. Makes it very difficult fir home health care nurses. Snitty class warfare ideas about garages were left in the dust some years ago. Meanwhile we don’t have the public transportation infrastructure of Japan. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had socialized medicine like theirs. Price controls led to them developing superior mri machines, much cheaper. So now Japan has a longer life span and makes $$$ selling mri while we wait for ours to amortize. Back to our reality the city plans to remove 500 parking spaces along Fulton so things will be getting ugly whether people clear their garages or nit. It’s already a law you cannot use your garage for just storage.
“It’s already a law you cannot use your garage for just storage.”
Like a large percentage of the planning laws on the books in San Francisco, this one is not enforced.
bus is not parked. it is at the corner turning from geary onto park presidio.
@JD: “It’s already a law you cannot use your garage for just storage.”
Like a large percentage of the planning laws on the books in San Francisco, this one is not enforced.
– I think it’s a little more complicated than that – looked it up recently bc I thought that was the law too but it only applies to…I will have to look it up again bc I forget.
Re: “It’s already a law you cannot use your garage for just storage.”
Only for apartments, I think, unless someone knows otherwise?
§ 6_603
GARAGES.
[Added by Ord. 399-89, App. 11/6/89; amended by Ord. 161-92, App. 6/4/92; Ord. 350-95, App. 11/3/95; Ord. 256-07, App. 11/6/07]
(a) No automobile or other motor vehicle shall occupy any portion of an apartment house or hotel except in a garage which meets the requirements of the Building Code and other provisions of the Municipal Code.
(b) Use. Private and public storage garages in apartment houses and hotels shall be used only for storage of automobiles.
The bus, and the RAV 4 behind it, aren’t parked. They’re in the turning lane. The meter maid isn’t ticketing anyone. S/he is probably just playing on their phone.
@Maureen,
Is this for real? I know developers aren’t allowed to build sufficient parking, but surely it’s not this stupid of a ratio. I hope.
Really??? –> Condos now only have to provide a parking space for every four units.
Another Richmond Blog article recently indicated that the city wants to _reduce_ parking requirements so that developers can build taller building in lots of residential areas with even lower requirements for providing parking. If the city wants cars off the streets, just REQUIRE adequate parking so we don’t circle forever for spots. I live near restaurants that attract non-residents, occupy huge amounts of parking, and require me to drive around a LOT some days trying to find a spot. This is just horribly bad planning.
The city needs to stop pretending that transit can replace cars entirely. Huge Muni improvements, like a Geary subway would allow me to take fewer car trips, but I still need my car a lot. And we don’t have a Geary subway. So lets all live in the real world and require adequate parking.
@Jon L Just like road and freeway widening induces more automobile traffic, more parking induces more automobile trips by making it much easier for motorists to find parking. If parking is difficult, people are much more likely to ride transit instead of drive. Our family often has dinner in the Richmond District, although we live elsewhere in SF and Muni is the best option for us to get there and back. Muni is improving.
And… if you advocate for more parking you are also (indirectly) advocating for more congested streets, for the same reasons I mentioned (induced demand). This is a city and high levels of automobile use here slows Muni, endangers pedestrians and bicyclists, makes the City less livable, and worsens our environment with as yet unknown consequences. Building more parking was the approach to solve all parking problems as of the 1940s-1950s. Did it work? Why should it work this time?
Most of the cars clogging the streets are commuters. Try to get anywhere during the several hours long rush hour that is anywhere near the bay bridge. Funny building all these condos without adequate garage space has not made things any better. Punishing San Franciscans for owning a car won’t solve the problem.
The Richmond used to be 1 family, 1 car per house, essentially (a long time ago). I know it’s not PC but we need to go back to that. If Marina-style homes are becoming rentals with 4 occupants, fine – not too much we can do about that, as far as enforcement goes, I guess. But I think it would restore some sanity to parking to implement some sort of ‘one car per household’ or ‘two cars per household with garage’ type thing (don’t know what the right combo would be).
You can’t annoy people out of their cars. Clearly, we already sit in horrible traffic and spend too much time looking for parking. So there’s the proof that bad traffic and inadequate parking doesn’t discourage anything. It just facilitates wasting a lot of fuel and causing a lot of additional pollution. Public transit is not practical to get from the outer Richmond to the south bay. 511.org tells me my best public transit commute would be 3 hours each way.
For the folks that think more streets and parking somehow encourages cars, I’m encouraged to know that you also won’t support additional housing as a way to fix the housing shortage – because that would just encourage more people to clog our city.
I don’t think the 1 space per 4 condos is correct. I visited the sales office for the Rockwell which is the 2 tower building going up on Van Ness and Pine. The only units that have no parking are the junior 1 bedrooms. All the other units from full 1 bedrooms to the 3 bedroom are all allocated one space. If you don’t want your space, then you can sell it back to them for $40 K.
Can you provide a citation for that 1-4 ratio?
@Mike: Could be that condos *have* to supply a certain amount of spaces per unit, but *can* supply more.
I understand that Scott, but a developer will try to put in as many spaces as they can. As I said, it’s $40K per space at the Rockwell. And since they use a lift system, it saves even more space. It’s the city that tries to limit the amount of parking spaces that they can put in. If I recall correctly, some years back Chris Daly tried to make it one space for every two units. That got shot down before the words got out of his mouth.
There was a ballot initiative maybe 3 or 5 years ago, where SF residents could have _allowed_ (not *required*) developers to provide more parking per unit. The “cholesterol is good for your arteries / roads” crowd won that election. So instead of parking, we have clogged arteries. A victory for nobody.
As a reformed Transportation Planner/Researcher (a long time ago) I always have an eye out for things related to this topic. One thing I have noticed is that with the advent of Urber/Lyft that there is more cars in our area. They tend also to drive faster than the locals. Now this is just my perception, I was (am) a good enough researcher to know that perception of an urban issue is worth 2 cents. Only real data can tell the story. But if my suspicions are correct, more people on my block, particularly the younger ones, are using urber/lyft and not MUNI. It really does not matter if they are not driving their cars…if their demand is pulling otherwise garaged/parked cars onto the streets then the net effect will not be positive. A bus has a great passenger mile to fuel ratio. An Urber/Lyft pick up does not. I think people are underestimating the Urber/Lyft effect a great deal. But like all these things it will take years for someone to do the hard research and by then the Uber/lyft model will be here to stay good or bad.
I wonder how many cars driving for Uber/Lyft come from off-street parking vs. on street?
Interesting subject parking.
@JD: You are absolutely right that perceptions count, and that people are driving much faster than in the past. Though I would argue it’s across the board, not just Uber/Lyft. I also think you’re right that people are using Uber/Lyft and even taxis more often to get out here – never really used to see taxis in these parts, and now you do see them fairly regularly. One thing that might happen is that (while I think Muni really probably is at a point where it can start to get better, finally), people might rely on services like the Chariot, which is a private van/shuttle company that routes based on demand. They have been gaining traction in these parts.
One thing to keep in mind on the Uber/Lyft issue is that these drivers “have a built in” reason to go fast. Namely, the more pickups an hour the more money they make. Unlike those who are just brain dead and drive too fast or those who cannot control their life/schedule and have time to get where they are going…the Urber/Lyft model rewards bad behavior by increasing income for the more rides they can get in over a set period of time. We have that with cabs but now we have thousands more doing it.
This will also, without a doubt, see an increase in accidents over time. We will all pay larger insurance bills unless and until all Urber/Lyft drivers are required to have (and prove it) commercial insurance.
Everything has side effects. All aspects of the shared economy cannot escape this fact.